Outnumbered. Mandi Eizenbaum

      7

      I woke with the rising sun shining through the embroidered linen curtains that rustled softly in my bedroom window. Although I felt lucky that I had managed to escape all the chaos of the previous night, my chest was still sore and heavy, and my head pounded with the force of a jackhammer. I was dazed with the fatigue and panic that still filled my aching body. I was mentally and physically exhausted.

      Did my buddies also make it to their homes safely? All this mess because of Bobo’s cabrón coconut scheme! I rationalized to myself. It was always easy to blame things on Bobo.

      The dreadful realization hit me that I now had another problem to worry about. Yes, I had managed to dodge the police raid the night before, but this morning, it was my mother and Saul I would have to contend with. I jumped out of bed, my sweaty shirt still clinging to my pasty skin, and went to the bathroom to rinse out my parched mouth and splash cold water on my face. A little fresher but still drunk with panic, I walked slowly, cautiously, down the hallway to the kitchen.

      Silence.

      I could smell the strong, bitter aroma of coffee brewing. And then I saw it. A single passport laid out on the kitchen table right next to a bunch of blackening plantains.

      Saul and Mamá couldn’t possibly know about last night already.

      I stood there in the kitchen doorway, staring at the lone passport on the table, my body quivering with chills, despite the insidious tropical heat. Startled by the sudden sound of Mamá’s low voice behind me, my bony knee knocked into the kitchen table.

      “You choose, Maxwell,” Mamá was saying. “It’s up to you, but today you will decide.” She emphasized the word today and continued in a quiet whisper, “Either you go to Israel to live with your father’s cousins on their kibbutz or…you can go to New York to stay with your Tío Daniel.”

      A maddened grunt escaped from deep inside my mother’s heaving rib cage as she let the mention of my uncle and my father escape through her clenched teeth and thin lips.

      There were options? My father had cousins in Israel? Mamá had contact with my estranged Tío Daniel? What the hell?

      I figured I was in for some kind of heavy reprimand for getting caught sneaking into the nightclub. But this choice I was being given seemed overly drastic. I mean, what choice was I really being given? I would have to leave my friends and my home.

      Who cares where I choose to go—I don’t want to go anywhere!

      Mamá’s voice remained low and composed, but I knew her well enough to detect the seriousness of her tone. This time, she meant business, and I wasn’t feeling all that lucky at that moment.

      My mother had never been a woman of many words. She didn’t talk or share much with others, especially not about the years before I was born and especially not about her brother Daniel. She had always maintained a wall of ambiguity around her—and more so since my father died, I had been told.

      Everyone had noticed the change in my mother’s demeanor when she lost my father. Mimi Chekovski, they would comment, had become “aloof,” “introverted,” “lifeless,” “distraught”—characteristics that really began to weigh her down. She hardly ever left the house, even to go to the synagogue on Saturday mornings. More quiet and reserved than ever, Mamá never really ever got over the loss of her great love. She had grown detached and stoic.

      And now she was offering me a choice that lay squarely upon the backs of my uncle and my father—the two biggest, most obscure, mysteries of the unspoken past.

      It didn’t take much for me to assume that the idea of sending me away was really not my mother’s idea but Saul’s. Still, the words coming from my mother’s mouth punched me right in the gut. My mother just stood watchfully at the kitchen counter—her distant stare, her trembling bow legs, her thinning blonde hair tucked behind her ears accentuating her thin, pointy nose. All the while, I kept my eyes on Saul who had snuck in, wearing only his faded blue and white boxer shorts, to stand just beyond her; tense and towering as always, his thin lips curled upward in a victorious evil grin.

      I took a deep inhale of air and considered this latest challenge. My chest heaved with a sharp, stabbing pain. A small defiant giggle escaped from my throat.

      This has to be a big joke at my expense. My own mother would never send me away…would she?

      Mamá’s admonition trapped me. I didn’t want to leave my friends and family behind, and I didn’t want to leave Cuba behind either. Even at a young age, I understood that this tiny island nation in the Caribbean took us in at a time when few others around the world would. In school, I remembered learning the story about the MS St. Louis debacle, about Cuba’s government closing its doors on a shipload of Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe and ultimately having them turn back to their demise at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nonetheless, thousands of Jews had made their way to the island before and after that, and Cuba had become a new safe haven—a small remote place in the world, however temporary, but valuable and precious to us just the same. In the long run, Cuba had given all of us a safe place to call home, a respite from our inevitable and horrible twentieth-century wanderings. And just like that, I now had to pick up and leave also?

      Cornered and standing in front of my mother and Saul in the kitchen, I took another deep breath, my whole torso filling with burning acid. I let out a long frustrated sigh and tried to relax.

      This is what my ancestors must have felt when they had to decide where to run next?

      Trapped, I could feel tears welling up in my eyes and blurring my vision, but I wouldn’t give Saul the satisfaction of seeing me cry. One of these days, Saul.

      Collecting myself, taking control of my emotions, I changed the course of my thoughts. I forced my natural curiosity and appetite for adventure to surface and take over my anxious unease. I was scared of what might be waiting for me on the other side of this decision I was being forced to make, but I wasn’t going to let that show. Especially not in front of Saul. Instead, youthful stubbornness and insolence pushed me forward. Like it or not, I had to make a choice.

      I picked up my passport from the table and pondered the choices in front of me. The following night, back at my grandparents’ place, the answer became crystal clear. I listened to the announcement of the winning bolita numbers—sixty-seven, seventy-three, and eighty-seven. Punch, suitcase, and New York.

      Well, Tío Daniel, I guess it’s time for us to finally meet.